ABSTRACT
Since Moorish times (from the eighth to the fifteenth century), and possibly much earlier (the Roman Empire), there has existed, on the southern edge of Sierra Nevada (southern Spain), a noteworthy technique of artificial recharge, known as careos”. This consists of the diverting of snowmelt to a series of sites with great infiltration capacity, where the water percolates to a greater or lesser extent. A tracer test was performed at a careo site and control points at the known springs located downstream. The calculated transient time varied from one spring to another. As expected, it was not possible to recover all of the tracer, and there were discovered to be various flow paths through the aquiferous material, as shown by the form of the tracer recovery curve, which presented more than one peak.
